Rocco Maiolo's Ramblings and Musings

The super short version: I'm still in near total remission :)   I had a scare about a month and a half ago when my blood test -- one day prior to a scheduled maintenance treatment -- came back with a dangerously low neutrophil count.         In normal people, the count should be between 2.0 and 7.5.  In cancer patients, they like it be between 1.0 and 2.0, especially in order to give you treatment.  Mine came back 0.1.  The long and short of it was that a) it was too low for treatment and b) I was in danger of picking up an infection (which I did and which landed me for a three day stay in the lovely Kindcardine, Ontario hospital while on vacation). My neutrophil count has been fairly low since originally being diagnosed a year and a half ago.  After my 0.1 count, my oncologist suggested that it might be time for another bone marrow biopsy.  That happened several weeks ago.  It came back negative -- which doesn't mean I have no bone marrow :) It means the cancer has

At Barnes and Noble in Norlfok reading Louise Gluck and The Walking Dead Absurd companions While my wife -- fifty today -- buys clothes at Kohls Lymphoma on hold Military jets fly in distant blue Grateful to be alive  Living in a Spring trailer Ireland in the Summer read Seamus Heaney soon Poets must suffer from love and loss (Like a psalmist's cup overflowing) I know I do, but I'm not a poet

February 10, 2015 I'm sitting in a hospital waiting room -- waiting for my oncologist to visit me.  My thoughts are all over the map.  I'm back at work after six months of chemo plus another two and a half month safety/recoup net. So my thoughts are of work, family, faith, IV, blog, fellow sufferers and then some. I tried to hotspot my phone to my iPad to get some work done. Failed. I tried to purchase a day of Internet here at the St. Catharines General. Failed. Shouldn't there be a free internet perk for cancer patients :) ? Maybe it's a sign that I shouldn't be working. The problem with my line of work is that as a consultant solely responsible for my domain, what I don't get done on a day like this doesn't magically go away -- it'll be waiting for me when I go back to work this afternoon. Blood pressure is high. I can't figure out if that's a systemic bad thing or an occasion-specific thing (I don't have a pick line so I have an